1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to the management of telephone systems and in particular to the efficient integration of components of a telephone system for ease of use.
2. Description of Prior Art
As technology continues to march forward year after year, the telecommunications professional is faced with an ever increasingly complex task of dealing with these systems. In the early days (circa 1982-85), a corporation's telecommunications infrastructure typically consisted of only a single phone system using a single Public Broadcast Exchange (PBX). When a new employee came aboard, maintenance on this system was relatively simple--a few commands was all that was required to add a new phone.
However, as corporations grew, so did their phone systems. Soon, companies had multiple systems scattered among several sites. When an employee moved from one site to another more commands were needed to accomplish this task--a "delete" on the old system and an "add" on the new system.
Telecommunication professionals invented new ways in dealing with these changes. By using change requisition forms and control sheets, the work could be managed and processed in bulk--all manually. This technique worked--for a while.
For years, the only way to get reports on a corporation's phone activity was to wait for the bill from the phone company. However, soon the owners of these systems realized they too could track phone activity by using special data ports in the PBX. These ports became known as Station Message Detail Records or SMDR. The concept was simple--every time a phone call was completed, the PBX would transmit a single SMDR data packet. These data packets could be collected, stored on a computer, and detailed reports could be generated. A new system known as Call Accounting was introduced to meet this requirement.
However, Call Accounting systems also required their own data management. When a new employee came aboard, the telecommunications professional had to add a data record into the Phone System and into the Call Accounting system as well. When an employee moved, multiple records and multiple systems needed updating. But technology did not stop there. Soon corporations began replacing individual telephone answering devices with more economical Voice Mail Systems (VMS). These systems could literally replace thousands of individual answering devices with a single machine. However, these systems needed data management as well.
With the introduction of Computer-Based Phone Directories, Human Resource Systems, Credit Card/Authorization Code Systems, Emergency 911 Systems, Service Billing Systems, Network Access Devices, and many others, the telecommunications professional was soon faced with updating as many as 10 (or more) separate systems with the exact same information. Even with forms and procedures, this task was difficult at best and very error prone. Obviously, a better method was needed. The professional had to wait until around the early 90's before solutions were attempted to address this problem. The first attempt at solving this problem was known as product integration. The concept was simple, a telecommunications vendor would produce a product that would combine all of the needed features into a single package. By having all of the telecommunication systems in a single platform, software could be engineered to share a single database. This would allow a single data management screen to be presented to the telecommunication professional. From this screen, all products could be updated at once. Soon, products began appearing on the market that were Call Accounting+Voice Mail+Phone Directory (or the like) all in one software package. North Coast Logic produced two generations of such packages (VSX and ARENIX). These packages worked in many environments and are still in use today.
However, they didn't work in all situations. One problem was many corporations wanted multi-vendor solutions. The telecommunications professional did not want to be dependent on single vendor for the entire communications infrastructure. They wanted to shop and get the best value. They also soon realized that a single vendor could not be an expert in every industry. Another problem was that these integrated products typically consisted of a single hardware platform. All applications ran on a single machine. If that machine failed, the entire infrastructure was brought down. Even though many vendors tried to compensate for this by using highly reliable (and redundant) equipment, the solution still fell short of relieving the mounting workload on the professional.
The problem with a single database design became evident by the database technology itself. No single database technology fills every application requirement. Each vendor makes database technology decisions based on their unique system framework. For example, a Call Accounting system may be able to use any off the shelf Database Management System (DBMS), but a Voice Mail System needs a specialized data streaming system that is able to store and retrieve recorded voice data at 4-8 kb per second. A Phone System database is usually completely stored in memory and made up of a series of jump tables organized in a tree-like fashion. This allows the system to traverse the database as each digit is dialed. No off the shelf database product would fit all of these unique requirements.
In addition to the problems described above, an even worse issue exists with these early integrated systems. In a typical telecommunications environment, each of these systems have their own data entry terminal. This means that if the telecommunications professional does not use the integrated data management screen to do updates, the various databases in each system will become out-of-sync with each other. This is known as the multiple-entry problem.
For example, suppose that the telecommunications professional updates the phone system via its own data entry terminal, but updates the Call Accounting and Phone Directory via the integrated data management screen. In this scenario, it is possible that the changes made directly to the PBX may be lost or be left different than those in the integrated product. The two databases are out-of-sync.
Although it is tempting to mandate that all data entry is done via the integrated screen, in practice this is seldom the case. In many situations, work is required to be performed on a specific system and may require the use of a special field not accessible via the integrated screen. Even if all features could be moved to the integrated data management screen, the user interface would be so unwieldy that no user could navigate it.